March 6, 1959

Faculty and students joined in a Baroque Symposium. Speakers at the event included Henri Peyre, Sterling Professor of French at Yale, who spoke on “Classicism and the Baroque in 17th Century French Literature;” Rudolph Wittkower, chairman of the department of art and archeology at Columbia University, who spoke on “Decorum and Allegory in Dynastic Monuments of the Baroque” and Henry Guerlac, professor of the history of science at Cornell University who discussed “Reason and Unreason in 17th Century Science.” The lecture by Professor of Ecclesiastical History George B. Williams, from the Harvard Divinity School was entitled “Paradise or Wasteland? ”

The Vassar Experimental Theater presented John Milton’s The Masque of Comus (1634), directed by George Brendan Dowell, with designs by John Kurten. Special exhibitions in Taylor Hall included The Baroque Illusion: Stage Designs, 1650-1850 from the Cooper Union Museum, curated by Richard P. Wunder and circulated by the American Federation of Arts, and Rembrandt etchings from the Vassar College Collection, given in 1942 by Mrs. Felix Warburg.